25 Life Lessons Learned From an Abusive Childhood

Childhood should be carefree, playing in the sun; not living a nightmare in the darkness of the soul.” ― Dave Pelzer, A Child Called “It”

It’s no secret that early life in our parents’ house was dark, dangerous and often deadly. Father was institutionalized when I was seven as paranoid/schizophrenic. After he got out, a robot had replaced the man we’d known – the angry, hurtful man who spoke loudest with his fists – because medications kept him numb, took his spirit from him. Eventually, he ceased to exist in our lives. Mother was worse, for she refused to allow anyone to look inside her head for fear of having to face herself. And so she was allowed to exact the most horrific abuses onto us; pain that sculpted our lives like powerful winds will warp the trunk of a tree as it grows.

The first thing I learned as a boy was that mother wanted me dead. I spent nearly thirty years trying to fulfill that wish. After my first drug overdose, subsequent death, and then revival, I realized that even though she had long passed from this world, I had allowed her to live on within me. I saw that I had taken ownership of her hate, saw how I had allowed her power to warp me in so many ways. And on that day – September 2, 1992 – I knew that I was meant to live. And I set about relearning how to be a kind, compassionate man. How to love myself. These are some of the lessons learned during that long, difficult journey back to self-love, redemption and hope.

1. I am not responsible for others’ mistakes, flaws, or lack of empathy or compassion.

2. No one can make me feel bad about myself. Only I can do that, and I choose not to.

3. It only takes one person to forgive.

4. The things other’s say reflects wholly on them, and not on me. (“I am a mirror; look at me and see yourself.”)

“A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one’s art. One must accept it. For this reason I speak in a poem of the ancient food of heroes: humiliation, unhappiness, discord. Those things are given to us to transform, so that we may make from the miserable circumstances of our lives things that are eternal, or aspire to be so.” ― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions